Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has taken a leading role in Senate efforts to renew the most sweeping aspects of domestic spying. Other members of his party, such as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., want amendments to protect privacy. Paul went so far as to say he wanted to repeal the Patriot Act.
I was going to write a column about this issue. Then I remembered. I already have. It appeared on Dec. 30, 2005. Now we know the abuse of powers in the act are fully as bad as I expected they would be. So the same arguments apply. They just carry greater force.
Here's that column, verbatim, but a few clarifications are in order. Any reference to the "president" is to then-President George W. Bush. Sitting President Barack Obama supports privacy amendments, although critics say he doesn't go far enough. The "new Dark Age" quote is from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, given in his June 18, 1940 speech to Parliament at the height of the Battle of Britain:
Americans must choose between open-season spying and terrorism in 2006, according to the president. Let him spy on whomever he wants or risk another terrorist attack, he says. Fine. As far as I'm concerned, pull out the wiretaps. Close down the secret prisons and stop torturing too.
We founded this country on principles of personal freedom. If we must let the president's power extend beyond those principles to be safe, then goodbye and good riddance to safety. Put my family and me on a jet plane. Have us commute to New York every day. We'll take our chances.
I face a thousand times more risk of dying on the road every time I go to Little Rock than I face of ever being killed by a terrorist. To let loose a Big Brother government so it can slightly reduce such a remote risk would be cowardice.
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty or security," Benjamin Franklin said. "They" are in the White House, as I wrote in a column in the Fayetteville Free Weekly.
The United States is supposed to be the kind of country our troops are fighting for. This is not where we're supposed to be leading the Iraqis and the Afghans. We cannot show the way to democracy anywhere else by bowing down at home.
The world has changed, we're told. I remember 9/11. I also know, however, that the British had their finest hour while London was being bombed every day.
Is this our finest hour? If America lasts a thousand years, is this what we want to be remembered for? Frightened into tyranny by people who wear TNT?
We are democracy, and this is our trial. If we fail, "then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."
Another speech Churchill gave in July 1941 was about bombing: "I must, however, admit that when the storm broke in September, I was for several weeks very anxious about the result. Sometimes the gas failed; sometimes the electricity. There were grievous complaints about the shelters and about conditions in them. Water was cut off, railways were cut or broken, large districts were destroyed, thousands were killed, and many more thousands were wounded. But there was one thing about which there was never any doubt. The courage, the unconquerable grit and stamina of our people, showed itself from the very outset. Without that all would have failed. Upon that rock, all stood unshakable. All the public services were carried on, and all the intricate arrangements, far-reaching details, involving the daily lives of so many millions, were carried out, improvised, elaborated, and perfected in the very teeth of the cruel and devastating storm."
Today, we suffer so little. Do we bear it as badly as the president believes?
Does forging our chains require so little heat?
President-elect Abraham Lincoln gave an impromptu speech in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1861. He was on his way to his first inauguration. He faced a far greater threat to the future of this country than this president ever will.
Awed to finally stand where the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Midwestern country lawyer said the promise in the Declaration was not only to Americans. It was that all are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If this country could not be saved without giving up that principle, then he was not the man to help save this country.
Amen. That is what an American president is supposed to be.
Commentary on 05/02/2015